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Fatima Meer's Fatima Meer’s ‘Train from Hyderabad’: Diaspora, Social Justice, Gender and Political Intervention Rajendra Chetty Kasturi Beharie-Leak Abstract Fatima Meer’s memoir, Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days, 1976 (2001), and the short story ‘Train to Hyderabad’ (Meer 2010) as an anthologised entity drawn from it, symbolise women’s isolation under male scrutiny, male rage at female autonomy and the compulsion to gag female critique of male government whether domestic, provincial or national. Behind the historical fact of colonial pseudo-slavery termed indenture, which was not gender-specific, lies the surviving, wide-spread and less-recognised phenomenon of female subjugation which may be termed female indenture. This reading of ‘Train to Hyderabad’ re-enacts a liberatory process: freeing the text in a way which reflects Meer’s own scripting of her work in a pattern of self-denial and socialist concern for the oppressed about her. Keywords: Fatima Meer, diaspora, social justice, feminism, indenture, apartheid, socialism Introduction Fatima Meer’s short story, ‘Train to Hyderabad’ (2010) is an extract from her Prison Diary (2001). The appearance of ‘Train to Hyderabad’ in The Vintage Book of South African Indian writing (Chetty 2010) provides it with a specific context and set of meanings. First, few texts by South African Indian writers were encouraged for publication under colonial/apartheid regimes. This publication accords a fresh, democratic context to Meer’s tale. Second, this Alternation 24,1 (2017) 127 - 142 127 Electronic ISSN: 2519-5476; DOI: https://doi.org/10.29086/2519-5476/2017/v24n1a7 Rajendra Chetty & Kasturi Beharie-Leak short story, taken from Meer’s Prison Diary (2001), necessarily invokes Meer’s larger oeuvre and its significances. Third, ‘Train to Hyderabad’ recalls peer texts in the collection and exists in some sense with and within them as a whole. The introduction to the volume itself has an immediate intertextual exchange with the text under consideration: In his story, ‘Ratunya Mochi’, which also appears in The Vintage Book of South African Indian writings (2010), Ashwin Desai describes an example of the arrival in Durban of a young Indian woman. There are therefore two journeys concerning Hyderabad: Ratunya Mochi leaves Hyderabad in a ‘forced journey’ to South Africa and Meer, a respected sociologist, is on a visit to a conference in Hyderabad. The travels of these two women, though many years apart, are intertwined in various ways and intertextually linked at several levels. One of these being, how, the Indian Diaspora as a whole with its vast body of experiences, sufferings and adaptations, forms the much larger context of Mochi’s and Meer’s separate journeys. The trials and tribulations of women were often at the centre of Meer’s concerns, and she repeatedly focused on black women as a potential radical subjectivity (Desai 2010). In South Africa, discernible patterns of patriarchal hegemony were reified over a period of three centuries through mechanisms of colonial and apartheid structures in systems such as indentured labour and legislated racial segregation. Both systems have much in common structurally: both share the common element of white male colonial construction. Prerogatives of such patriarchy are frequently manifested in phallocentric displays of power, dominance, wealth or privilege: egocentric or vertical aspiration which neglects horizontal/democratic issues of care and compassion. Womanist impulses, by contrast, countermand systems of male dominance in particular and solipsistic male intentions generally. Horizontal attitudes of community concern, social responsibility and public well-being are propagated ipso facto according to modes of thought evidenced in such thinkers as Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf or Fatima Meer. Schreiner exposes Rhodes’s male greed and self-interest in her much-neglected tract ‘Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland’ (1897). In To the Lighthouse (1927) Woolf’s anatomy of female concern for community is registered in Mrs Ramsay’s bouef-en-daube dinner-party and in contrast to Mr Ramsay’s egocentric concern with his writing career. His predatory sexual appetite is imaged in the ‘brass beak’. The lighthouse itself is one of the most enduring emblems of male phallic aspiration and psychological dominance. The Mis-Trial of Andrew 128 Fatima Meer’s ‘Train from Hyderabad’ Zondo: A Sociological Insight (1998) by Meer is a ground-breaking exposure of miscarriage of justice due to male-constructed legalities that fail to account for the social dimensions of the dehumanising strictures and their effect upon an individual of colour under apartheid laws. It is essential to realise how few women prisoners record their experiences in prison. Nagel (2008) points out that: In most prison narratives women get relegated to the roles of stoic, heroic mothers … However, all over Africa, rather than being passive bystanders, women also engaged in their own revolutionary struggles … Yet few women write about their own ordeal. South African prison literature is an exception to this trend, as Fatima Meer, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Emma Mashinini, Ellen Kuzwayo, Ruth First and others enagaged in autobiographical writings. (2008: 75) Agency and Political Intervention Contestation of social and national resources occurs in the ineluctable conflict of purpose between vertical elements of male self-aggrandisement and female desire to nurture community in all fields. Confrontation between female life- force and male power-force causes agents of hegemonic male structures to fear, suspect and punish women’s refusal to respect the margins of male-invented social systems. Male dominance, when expressed in colonial exploitation or racial segregation, attempts to silence, isolate and humiliate the subaltern female. Writing by women, and especially black women in South Africa, was consequently policed: the voices of women critical of white male control were muffled by various means of censorship, ridicule or partisan neglect. Meer’s Prison Diary (2001), and the extract ‘Train to Hyderabad’ (2010) as an anthologised entity drawn from it, symbolise women’s isolation under male scrutiny, male rage at female autonomy and the compulsion to gag female critique of male government whether domestic, provincial or national. Behind the historical fact of colonial pseudo-slavery termed indenture, which was not gender-specific, lies the surviving, wide-spread and less-recognised phenomenon of female subjugation which may be termed female indenture. The purpose of this reading of Meer’s, ‘Train to Hyderabad’ is to re-enact a liberatory process: freeing it in a way which reflects her own scripting of the 129 Rajendra Chetty & Kasturi Beharie-Leak texts in a pattern of self-denial and socialist concern for the oppressed about her. Meer diminishes the significance of her own writing but celebrates its existence in the reader’s mind and actions in society. Procedures whereby a ‘primary’ text is released from its textual coherence or autonomy by means of continuous contextualisation and intertextual corroboration to the point that ‘it’ (the text) disappears, is consonant with Meer’s socialist concern to lose herself in the agency of political intervention. This denial of self in the greater cause of social justice is at one with much of Phyllis Naidoo’s (2007) writing which deliberately erases ecriture in a desire to achieve community; an egalitarian ideal radically opposed in its Marxist vision to the logocentric, phallocentric regime of materialist paternalistic hegemonies. By floating the ‘text’ on a raft of contextual and intertextual associative meanings, conventions of enclosure may be deconstructed or dissolved in order to recuperate Meer’s concern for public disclosure of the myriad horizontal, womanist imperatives that rendered her life and thought socially responsible and nationally admirable. In this process the ‘short story’ ‘Train to Hyderabad’ dissolves in terms of peer texts, such as those by Ronnie Govender (2002) or Phyllis Naidoo (2002). By dissolving the ‘short story’ or rather excerpt from her Prison Diary in the course of such comparisons, broader, intertextual palimpsests are revealed in the overall liberation of author and diary. Between the staccato style of Naidoo and the limpid habit of Meer’s prose, there is much work to be done in recognising the rhetorical devices and skill of the two prison narratives. Meer’s ‘Train to Hyderabad’, journeying out of her Prison Diary and snaking back in again is the proverbial ‘nested’ text, a story- within-a-story, juxtaposing the author’s constructed memories of the temporal, spatial and visual spaces in Hyderabad with the in situ confined space of political incarceration in the Johannesburg prison. Although Prison Diary is boundaried by the four walls of her cell, Meer breaks the ‘fourth wall’ between writer and reader through vignettes such as the ‘Train to Hyderabad’, which create an inter-subjective platform for multiple others to take the stage as it were: Vesta butted into my narrative, shocked (2010: 83). Beyond engaging with both stories in a temporal capsule, Meer also creates a spatial capsule in Prison Diary which acts as a container for her narratives to breathe and live. This space, which is not ‘black or white’ but ‘black and white’ 130 Fatima Meer’s ‘Train from Hyderabad’ invokes a ‘third space’ (Bhabha 1994) which enables new possibilities between the container and the contained, displacing the histories that constitute it
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